Worldmaking

by David Milne

  That Nixon chose Kissinger to help implement his strategic vision made sense in spite of their differences. Kissinger also believed that the nation’s relative decline necessitated a strategic rethink. Kissinger would complain that Americans “never fully understood that while our absolute power was growing, our relative position was bound to decline as the Soviet Union recovered from World War II.”85 In August 1971, Kissinger met with a collection of conservative intellectuals, including William Rusher, the editor of The National Review, and Allan Ryskind, the editor of Human Events. Finding them locked in quite a different era—when Paul Nitze’s and Walt Rostow’s expansionary doctrines retained luster—Kissinger reminded them that Nixon was elected following “the collapse of foreign policy theory. A new frontier of the 1960s had ended in the frustration of Vietnam, a divided country, and vicious isolationism clamored [for] by liberals.”86

  While Nitze and his ilk had badly erred, Kennan’s notion of containment, though admirable in certain ways, lacked the specifics to wage effective diplomacy in a multipolar world. As Kissinger observed in White House Years, “Containment treated power and diplomacy as two distinct elements or phases of policy. It aimed at an ultimate negotiation but supplied no guide to the content of those negotiations. It implied that strength was self-evident and that once negotiations started their content would also be self-evident.”87 Like Kennan, Kissinger strongly believed in the necessity of negotiating with America’s enemies—ignoring powerful nations was reckless and pointless, engagement brought significant rewards. But Kissinger was more comfortable deploying the military—to maintain and enhance U.S. “credibility,” a geostrategic attribute he valued above all others—where he deemed it necessary. So the United States intervened forcefully, and in many cases calamitously, in North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, and significant credibility was vested in the outcome of conflicts on the Indian subcontinent, in sub-Saharan Africa, and in Latin America. Kissinger longed to liberate American foreign policy from the expensive demands of waging the global Cold War on the lines suggested in NSC-68. But he struggled to control his tendency to view all conflicts through a zero-sum lens, which artificially inflated the stakes involved. Kissinger’s Cold War perspectives were conventional in many respects.

  Though Kissinger viewed containment as underdeveloped, George Kennan was delighted that a realist thinker partial to nineteenth-century European history had assumed such a prominent position. In 1966, Kennan met Kissinger for lunch in Cambridge and found him “now fully recovered from the militaristic preoccupations of earlier years,” a reference to Nuclear Weapons and Foreign Policy, which Kennan predictably abhorred.88 When Kennan called a few days after Nixon’s victory to offer his congratulations, Kissinger assured Kennan that the president-elect regarded him as “a leading example of people whose possibilities were not being used by the last administration.”89 Here Kissinger might have hurt Kennan in his kindness, building unrealistic expectations that his counsel would again be sought out, which proved not to be the case. Nonetheless, Kennan and Kissinger corresponded frequently and appreciatively, the older man advising the younger to hold to a steady course as Wilsonian-inclined criticism of his foreign policy sharpened from 1973 onward.

  Paul Nitze, meanwhile, was not sure what to make of Nixon’s victory and Kissinger’s appointment. In the first few months of 1969, he was consumed by his campaign to save Safeguard—the antiballistic missile system designed to shoot down incoming nuclear missiles—from an emboldened and increasingly cost-obsessed Congress. While Kissinger supported his efforts, Nitze also learned that one of the Nixon administration’s primary objectives was to improve relations with Moscow and to embark upon strategic arms limitation talks, a process soon known as SALT. Nitze supported nuclear arms limitation talks in theory, but only if they preserved America’s advantage. As he recalled, “I doubted Mr. Nixon’s interest in negotiating an arms control agreement with the USSR; other matters crowded his agenda. The major problems facing him were the country’s growing disillusionment with its involvement in Vietnam, a general weakening of our relative strategic military posture and capabilities vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, a worsening of our economic position relative to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and the European Community, and a loosening of our ties to our allies and friends.” Nitze was surprised and delighted, therefore, when Secretary of State William Rogers invited him to join the administration as an arms control negotiator in a team led by Gerard Smith: “I assured Rogers that I was indeed interested in the job.”90

  After Rogers informed the president of Nitze’s enthusiastic response, a meeting was arranged with Nixon and Kissinger in July 1969. The president came to the point with uncharacteristic clarity. “Paul,” he said, “I very much want you to take this job. I have no confidence in Rogers nor do I have complete confidence in Gerry Smith … So I want you to report anything you disapprove of directly to me.” Nitze could scarcely believe what he was hearing. The president wanted him to serve as a spy in an operation that would marginalize the State Department and the man Nixon had chosen to lead it. “If I am to be a member of the delegation,” Nitze replied, “it will be as a member of Gerry Smith’s team and not as someone reporting to someone else. And in any case, Smith reports to the secretary of state, who must have complete confidence in what Smith reports. That’s the way it has to work!”91 Nixon grew irritated: “God damn it, I’ve told you what the channel of communication is and if anything comes up, I want you to use it.” After negotiations began in Helsinki in November, a private line was installed to allow Nitze to communicate discreetly with the White House. Nitze never dialed the number. They “knew that I was not going to do anything like that,” he said, an assessment that underestimated Nixon and Kissinger’s views on the fallibility of man.92

  Kissinger was exasperated, though not surprised in light of experience, by Nitze’s refusal to do as instructed. Clearly the only way to keep SALT under Nixon and Kissinger’s full control was to lead the process themselves. And as it happened, the architecture to do so was already in place. Soon after Nixon’s inauguration, Kissinger had established a secret back channel with the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Anatoly Dobrynin. Nixon told the ambassador that conventional State Department channels left sensitive communications “open to an excessively broad range of officials.”93 Instead, Dobrynin should communicate all important messages from Moscow directly to Kissinger, the president’s point man.

  Dobrynin and Kissinger met frequently; as often as once a week when the situation demanded. The ambassador would enter the White House through a discreet entrance on the East Wing and meet Kissinger in the Map Room. Their conversations were remarkably free-flowing and familiar, interspersed with jokes and inquiries about family and mutual friends and acquaintances in Washington. Substantively, both men reveled in being indispensable to their political masters. The Soviet political scientist and U.S. specialist Georgy Arbatov observed that “the Channel was done largely to feed Kissinger’s ego and grandeur, if I may be so blunt. And perhaps for Dobrynin’s ego, too.”94

  Although Arbatov’s assessment contains a measure of truth, it fails to do justice to the scale of their achievements. As Jeremi Suri observes, “In an unprecedented manner, Moscow and Washington cooperated to implement agreements on the permanent division of Berlin (the Four Power Agreement), nuclear non-proliferation (the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty), arms limitation (the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty and the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty), security and cooperation in Europe (the Helsinki Accords), and even basic principles of international conduct.”95 Kissinger would discover that there were significant costs, though, to brokering agreements in a manner that excluded—in order of importance—Congress, the State Department, the press, and the general public. And each group in time would turn on him. Like Kennan before him, there is little doubt that Kissinger envied the latitude afforded Soviet diplomats serving a totalitarian government.

  Nitze discovered only after the fact
that his negotiating efforts in Helsinki, and later Vienna, were a sideshow; the serious business was being done by Kissinger and Dobrynin in the Map Room. It infuriated Nitze, and with good reason. During a back-channel meeting on April 9, 1970, Nitze discovered that “Kissinger had effectively repudiated our initial Vienna proposals even before we offered them, telling Dobrynin that if the Soviet Union preferred something more limited, he would be happy to entertain it. Knowing in advance that the delegation’s proposals were not backed at the top, the Soviets lost nothing by stalling.” The executive branch was inadvertently sabotaging the delegation’s carefully calibrated efforts, and Nitze railed against this impotency: “For all practical purposes, this meant that there had been two sets of parallel negotiations—those between the officially designated delegations, and those between Kissinger and Dobrynin. I suspected that that was happening, but like the rest of the members of the delegation, I was kept in the dark.”96

  In 1971, Kissinger attempted to use the back channel as a bargaining tool with Nitze, promising to divulge details of his discussions with Dobrynin in exchange for his keeping tabs on Gerald Smith. Nitze again declined to serve as a spy, though he promised Kissinger that he would not tell Smith about the back channel’s existence. This established a pseudoconspiratorial bond between them, though one NSC staffer observed that “it was not clear who was using who.”97 Nitze continued to fume about being left out of the loop. Kissinger grew ever more irritated by Nitze’s obstinacy. Relations between the two men, never warm, continued to deteriorate.

  * * *

  Nixon and Brezhnev signed the SALT I agreement in Moscow in May 1972 to the reassuringly bright glare of blanket media coverage. It was a historic occasion. The summit marked the first time since Roosevelt’s presidency that an American president had set foot in the Soviet Union. It was a high point of détente and of Nixon’s presidency. The substance of the summit, and the process it portended, followed Kissinger’s views on the importance of removing Wilsonian precepts from the nation’s diplomacy. Both Kissinger and Nixon agreed that morality and human rights were out of bounds. In a discussion about speeches on May 22, Kissinger observed: “I don’t think it is proper for you to start lecturing them about freedom of speech.” Nixon replied, “oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no.”98 Those seven “nos” told quite a story. An enemy previously characterized as hell-bent on global conquest had been normalized, the repressiveness of its system purposely downplayed. Castlereagh and Metternich would have cheered this infusion of cold reason into America’s external relations.

  The summit made for great theater. After signing the world’s most significant nuclear arms control agreement in the splendor of the Kremlin’s St. Vladimir Hall—formalities were exchanged under a two-ton chandelier, which hangs from a glorious fifty-four-foot cupola—Brezhnev and Nixon retreated to the former’s dacha just outside Moscow, where they exchanged warm toasts and drank heroic quantities of cognac over the course of a two-hour caviar-laden dinner. After returning to Washington, an elated Nixon convened a joint session of Congress and delivered a nationally televised speech. Though Nixon cautioned that he did not “bring back from Moscow the promise of instant peace,” he added incautiously, “We do bring the beginning of a process that can lead to lasting peace.” There was much to be happy about. A major element of Nixon and Kissinger’s grand strategy—improved relations with Moscow—had been pursued with style, reaping a significant achievement. A major arms control agreement, laying down an important marker for the future, had been reached. Plus the State Department had been frozen out of the process and thus denied the credit that Nixon and Kissinger gathered solely for themselves. The president’s good spirits evaporated, however, when he began to notice that Kissinger was being accorded the lion’s share of the credit. In June 1972, the Chicago Sun-Times declared that Kissinger “had become a legend.”99 Kissinger could have done without such headlines, although he enjoyed them all the same.

  Nitze had worked long, hard hours on the SALT negotiations in Helsinki and Vienna, and their essentials had been thrashed out elsewhere. This was a painful reality to accept, and Nitze’s assessment of the agreement was correspondingly harsh. SALT I comprised two parts: an ABM Treaty and the inelegantly phrased and capitalized “Interim Agreement Between The United States of America and The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on Certain Measures With Respect to the Limitation of Strategic Offensive Arms.” The ABM Treaty limited each nation to just two sites where an anti-ballistic missile system could be located, foreclosing the possibility of a defensive race potentially more costly than the armed version. Unlike with the interim agreement, Nitze had played an important role in thrashing out its provisions: “I thought that the ABM treaty, which I had some hand in fashioning, was a definite step forward in arms control, a model perhaps for future agreements … The Interim Agreement covering offensive weapons, on the other hand, was flawed in that … it tended to accentuate the asymmetries that already existed in favor of Soviet land-based missiles.”100

  Rather than safeguarding the United States, then, Nitze believed that the SALT I treaty had entrenched the Soviet Union’s advantage in “throw-weight” capability—the combined weight of each side’s ballistic missile payloads. In fact, one important missile technology that SALT I failed to ban was the development of Multiple Independent Reentry Vehicles (or MIRVs), which critically undermined the treaty’s ceilings on permitted missile numbers. A MIRVed missile was a single rocket carrying multiple nuclear warheads capable of striking different targets. Critics of the treaty observed with some justification that SALT I—symbolically important as it may have been—actually started a new arms race hidden within the carapace of the superpowers’ missile arsenals. George Kennan found the whole affair mystifying and distressing. After the Moscow Summit, Kennan wrote in his diary that Washington and Moscow should be working to eliminate nuclear weapons, not puttering around with “the wretched ABMs and MRVs and MIRVs and SALTs and what not.”101

  For different reasons, Nitze believed that SALT I was an almighty mess, but he chose not to resign in protest. Instead he joined forces with Admiral Elmo Zumwalt Jr., chief of naval operations and a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in an effort to undermine Kissinger from within the administration. Zumwalt was a highly decorated veteran who feared, as Nitze did, that Kissinger was frittering away America’s military advantage. Zumwalt’s perception was that no one “knew better than Paul the way Henry Kissinger and his apparatus filtered all communications to the President so that, on the whole, Mr. Nixon only saw and heard what Kissinger wanted him to see and hear.”102 Whether true or false—and this assessment fails to comprehend the essential point that Nixon and Kissinger were on the same page—Zumwalt joined Nitze in viewing Kissinger as a threat to national security. Their anti-Kissinger machinations soon took something of a McCarthyite hue. Both men referred to Kissinger privately as a “traitor” and, as David Callahan observes, “gave credence to rumors that Kissinger had been recruited by the KGB when he worked for army intelligence in Germany. Nitze once even called a friend in the intelligence world to ask about Kissinger’s loyalty. No evidence ever emerged linking Kissinger to the Soviets, but Nitze remained suspicious.”103

  Nitze’s assault on Kissinger’s loyalty was perhaps the ugliest, most dishonorable chapter of his foreign-policy career. And his rancor did not abate with the years. In 1985, Nitze registered a jarring assessment of Kissinger, comparing him unfavorably with Averell Harriman:

  Harriman is the son of a very wealthy man, an aristocrat, an American-type patrician, very much imbued with the American liberal point of view, while Henry Kissinger, of course, is a European Jew, who had no such background whatsoever. Therefore he was not inhibited by any of the inhibitions someone brought up with the American liberal tradition had … So that Averell wouldn’t have thought of doing the tricky kinds of things that Kissinger did.

  Worrying with good reason that his assessment might be interpreted as anti-Semitic,
Nitze qualified his remarks, observing that “it wasn’t just Henry. There was the distinction between what I would call the climbers—the lower segments of the middle class were climbing up and their standards of what is proper are somewhat different than those in the patrician element in the United States.”104 Nitze disliked the substance of Kissinger and Nixon’s diplomacy and the equanimity with which they accepted Soviet nuclear parity. But it reflected poorly on him that he identified as explicatory the background of those at the helm: an émigré Jew and the son of a California grocer.

  * * *

  The Moscow Summit was certainly momentous, but the opening to China was the signature foreign-policy achievement of the Nixon presidency—and a hinge moment in modern world affairs. During the 1960s, few believed such a rapprochement was possible, or even desirable. How could Washington engage with Mao Zedong, the author of the Cultural Revolution, a program of state-sanctioned persecution that brutalized millions of alleged “revisionists” and “enemies of the revolution”?105 Yet some Americans were quite content to ignore China’s domestic tyranny in the name of a larger geostrategic good. Restoring relations with the world’s most populous country had been on George Kennan’s mind at least since 1963, when he observed in an interview—echoing Churchill’s oft-quoted remarks on endorsing the devil if Hitler invaded hell—that “we should be prepared to talk to the devil himself if he controls enough of the world to make it worth our while.”106 Nixon himself had recorded a similar view, albeit in more guarded prose, in his 1967 Foreign Affairs article “Asia After Viet Nam.”

  Yet Kissinger was skeptical when Nixon told him of his desire to normalize relations with Beijing and to visit the nation in person. When in July 1969, H. R. Haldeman informed the national security adviser that Nixon “seriously intends to visit China before the end of the second term,” Kissinger could barely suppress laughter, replying “fat chance.”107 Perhaps Kissinger suspected that Nixon had taken flight into a Walter Mitty–type imagining; a pointed reference Kissinger sometimes made to the fantastical daydreams of an unremarkable man. If so, Kissinger was wrong, for the president’s hopes were firmly grounded in reality.